There comes a time when a “ready-made” canvas just doesn’t cut it – when the surface is no longer up to your improving discernment, when the wood is no longer stable enough to depend on, and when sizings are unavailable. Like your improvement from student-grade paint to artist’s colours, choosing a custom-stretched canvas provides many benefits that will improve your artwork.

With a SAS Custom-Stretched Canvas, you can choose the exact size, surface, and format (portrait or landscape) you require, and have it freshly and tightly stretched on our premises. We use both Cedar - stable yet lightweight – or Laminated Pine stretcher bars with a special 180 degree round lip for strength, and we attach the canvas at the back of the frame using stainless-steel staples, leaving the sides staple-free.

The obvious benefits over off-the-shelf pre-stretched canvas are:

• Over a dozen different surfaces to suit the look you’re wanting – fine, medium, or coarse, either primed or un-primed, cotton or linen;

• Cedar stretcher bars – more stable yet light – and an extra strong profile for perfect edges;

• over 1,400 different sizes available;

• a tighter surface that is able to be re-tensioned;

• corners can be folded for either portrait or landscape formats;

• in the event of an unsuccessful painting, the stretchers can be re-used.

With over 30 years of experience, we are, in our considered opinion, the best people to stretch your canvas. We appreciate the hours that will be spent on the surface, and turn out tailor-made canvases to the specific needs of each of our clients. We also specialise in re-stretching existing artworks and fine-art inkjets.

A circular canvas is known as a tondo. In Renaissance Italy, it originated as a 12 sided birthing tray, for bringing refreshments to women who had just given birth, and afterwards hung on the wall to commemorate the event. Our professional tondo canvases are supplied either as a complete circular frame or with hand-primed linen stretched over them.

You improve the surface hugely by applying two or more further coats of primer to “pre-primed” canvas. Your initial paint film glides on without leaving “holes” where the weave is insufficiently filled; the colour intensity is heightened by increasing the reflective quality of the ground; and your paint will adhere better.

The da Vinci 2410 Brush is a traditional gesso brush, made from 4-fold thick hog bristles so it holds a lot of primer and lays it on nice and thick.  Primer can also be applied to a sealed surface using a roller.